This application claims the priority of Korean Patent Application No. 10-2004-0036784, filed on May 24, 2004, in the Korean Intellectual Property Office, the disclosure of which is incorporated herein in its entirety by reference.
1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display and a method for manufacturing the same.
2. Discussion of the Background
A liquid crystal display (LCD) is one of the most widely used flat panel displays. An LCD includes two panels provided with field-generating electrodes, such as pixel electrodes and a common electrode, and a liquid crystal (LC) layer interposed therebetween. The LCD displays images by applying voltages to the field-generating electrodes to generate an electric field in the LC layer, which determines orientations of LC molecules in the LC layer to adjust polarization of incident light.
A vertical alignment (VA) mode LCD, which aligns LC molecules such that the long axes of the LC molecules are perpendicular to the panels in the absence of an electric field, has a high contrast ratio and a wide reference viewing angle, which is defined as a viewing angle.
The wide viewing angle of the VA mode LCD can be realized by cutouts in the field-generating electrodes and protrusions on the field-generating electrodes. Since the cutouts and the protrusions can determine the tilt directions of the LC molecules, the tilt directions may be distributed into several directions by using the cutouts and the protrusions such that the reference viewing angle is widened.
However, because an etchant is used when etching the common electrode to form cutouts in manufacturing method of this LCD, the etchant may penetrate into a color filter in manufacturing process. The penetrated etchant damages and contaminates the color filter. To prevent these problems, a passivation layer may cover the color filter before depositing the common electrode, therefore the manufacturing process becomes complicated. In addition, adding the protrusions on the field-generating electrodes adds operations to the manufacturing process.